


and so the world has changed (and i must change as well)

by thestarsarewinning



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Background Character Death, Clint Barton Is a Good Bro, Gen, Getting Together, Growing Up, I Don't Even Know, I took Joss Whedon's canon out back and shot it, M/M, Minor Character Death, Parent Tony Stark, References to PTSD, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark is Good With Kids, Tony-centric, age of ultron probs didn't happen, and fire too, in case that's a trigger for anyone, it's very minor tho, not Steve or Tony or any avengers, the timeline is real questionable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-07-07 09:34:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15905631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestarsarewinning/pseuds/thestarsarewinning
Summary: It’s not the blink of an eye, but it feels like it, and Tony’s gone from being a mess to (still being that mess but with a cooler fashion sense) having his shit together, more or less, and having people, a family. It’s fucking weird and it’s possibly the best thing that’s ever happened to him.





	and so the world has changed (and i must change as well)

**Author's Note:**

> the title for this comes from 'Isabel' by Frank Turner
> 
> i have no right to anything, i'm just playing house

Life can be funny sometimes. That’s something Tony Stark knows all too well.

He’s the same he’s always been, the living embodiment of a party perhaps a half hour after it should have ended — loud, fun, so far past sober it’s not visible in the rearview mirror, sort of a disaster up close — but then one day, he’s in the dark, in a cave, in Afghanistan, in hell.

At his best, he’s a ‘genius billionaire playboy philanthropist’, a mess at his most honest, and then he’s a superhero. Still a mess, too, because honesty’s a bitch.

He’s single, in the sense that he never commits, never quite able to, and then he’s dating the girl, his girl, Pepper, and it’s the best thing that ever happened to him, going on date nights and building buildings, and trying to listen when someone tells him that he should have gone to bed a day and a half ago.

He’s a superhero, a gig he’s always sort of wanted, ever since he was in short pants and listening to Jarvis tell him stories, and it’s finally starting to really work, and then he’s dead, falling from space because…well, because he’s a superhero and there’s always a job that no one else can do, not really.

Then…he’s not dead. And there’s shawarma. And dreams he never wants to remember but can’t forget, and he was doing better, he was, he really was, but then a Norse god’s baby brother had to go and lose his shit and suddenly he’s falling, falling, out of power until he’s not.

He’s spent years on his own, doing the lone wolf thing and loving- And not completely hating it, but then one week, out of the blue, Captain America shows up in the kitchen, followed three days later by the Hulk, and then two scary assassins a week later. Clint and Natasha show up bruised and bloody and for once there’s someone more fucked up than him in his life.

Life can be really hilarious, Tony knows, because his girl, the girl, Pepper stands by the door one morning with her stuff all packed and tells him that she loves him, she really does, but she hates Iron Man and she can’t do it, no Tony, no more, and he eventually wakes up three days later on the floor of the workshop with Captain American staring at him incomprehensibly.

A Norse god — the majestic one, the one with the flowy, Rapunzel hair and his marbles more or less intact — shows up one day for breakfast and never leaves, and that’s normal, totally.

He’s still not alone, he never is these days, because Barton is a fucking vent gremlin and Bruce can science like there’s no tomorrow and Thor repels technology in a way that makes Tony want to get it to stick, and it’s weird that there ever was a time he wasn’t fighting with these nerds about what film they’re going to watch on Wednesday night.

It’s weird that he is, of course, Tony knows that it is, but it’s far weirder to him that there was a morning when he woke up and realised that all the fights he has with Captain America- Not Captain America, with Steve, all those fights and the days he lets Steve drag him to see the Statue of Liberty or the Museum of Modern Art or to fucking Applebees are because Tony really wants to kiss him, that morning is the weirdest by far.

Then he goes from being hopelessly in-something with his teammate and team captain and best friend to…dating him? And that’s a thing that happens, he asks Steve to dinner, or asks Steve, “So, I was wondering, if you wanted to-“

Because Steve kisses him then, and ‘go to dinner?,’ sort of dies on his lips, but they go anyway, on the worst first date he’s had in years, and wow can’t life be absolutely hilarious?

Tony goes from being ‘Tony Stark, playboy and train wreck in the making’, to being ‘Tony Stark, one half of the weirdest power couple’ and the fact that power couple could be both a metaphor thing and a literal thing gets him for a moment. The change does too, but this time it's not like he literally woke up one day to find the ground shifting beneath his feet. Or, blindfolded in cave with change literally implanted into his chest, but that’s a hair that didn’t need splitting.

He and Steve get to try being quietly domestic, taking each other to medical and making coffee in the mornings and only occasionally having sex in the kitchen, and they’re trying that out very slowly, because Steve is well…Steve and Tony is….Tony, and slow is the best way to take this until life decides that funny no longer cuts it and it’s time to be outright outrageous.

They’re a two, a couple, they’re a tentative if good thing, and then there’s a phone call and an emergency flight to Tennessee and a kid Tony Stark last saw when he was a mess, more of a mess than he’s been for a while, a kid with angry eyes and second degree burns where he ran back into a burning house for a little girl who’s watch Tony still has in a draw in his workshop.

Life is so fucking funny that a kid gets asked who there is the hospital can call for him and his only answer is Tony Stark. Tony, who sees the kid for the first time in years and remembers the moment he’d thought he might die on the side of a road in Tennessee, when his thoughts were so uncontrollable, and has to find a way to explain to Steve why he flies home three days later with Harley Keener, a duffle bag of salvaged belongings, and a social worker who seems stunned that the kid hadn’t been bullshitting her.

They were a new thing, a good thing, a thing that Tony’s only had once before and had wrecked then and is so afraid of wrecking now, but that thought isn’t enough to make him remove the hand he has on Harley’s shoulder.

Steve tries for a smile, he really does try, Tony can see that, but he’s Steve and this is still new for him, everything is, even that thing Tony did to him with his tongue the night before he flew to Tennessee at an ungodly hour of the morning without really saying anything apart from, “Emergency. Not an Avengers thing.”

And he’d known at the time that, ‘not an Avengers thing,’ had meant not a Steve thing, because they weren't necessarily at the point where you’d drop everything to fly out with your boyfriend for the kid who’d picked him up off the roadside back when the Avengers were busy forgetting each other existed.

That…maybe should have been a Steve thing, given that Tony had only ended up in Tennessee the first time because he’d kept deciding things weren’t ‘an Avengers thing’ and that had worked out so well for him, and this time wasn’t working out so great either. There’s a kid for whom Tony is a terrible influence and there’s the fact that this kid should not be with them, with the Avengers, because their lives are so fucked up that last week Steve had been stabbed — okay, he’d been lightly stabbed and the blade hadn’t even been covered in anything toxic or magical or poisonous, but still — and that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for them. That was just Tuesday.

And, contributing to the list of reasons why Tony should possibly have thought to turn to Steve is that he’d said ‘emergency’, after all. Maybe it really should have been a Steve thing and at least he’s learnt that lesson for future reference, but Steve still seems subdued and has done ever since Tony had walked through the door, saying, “Kid, these are the Avengers. Losers, this is Harley.”

Tony wants to laugh and call life a bitch because he’s trying to hold to the ground as the Earth keeps shifting and he doesn’t know what else to do but set Harley up in the room next to his and brush back the kid’s hair, mindful of the bandages and the stares of the people who regularly eat everything in his cupboards apart from the one box of muesli Pepper had left when she left.

The stares come from everyone but Steve, and Tony has the tiniest moment of panic that maybe he’s not one half of the weirdest power couple anymore.

It’s that moment of panic that makes him decide for certain that life most certainly is a bitch, he was fucking right.

Clint has the answer, because he too has suddenly gone from terrorising the security of the tower’s air vents to acting like he’s some kind of rational human being, and his answer is revolutionary. “Talk to him, Tony. Maybe he’ll surprise you again.”

Tony wants to retort that it’s highly unlikely that Steve will take some initiative and kiss him right at the same point that Tony finally gets up the courage to ask him out for a second time, but he’s apparently changed again, less of a car wreck and child and annoyance than he’d ever thought he’d be, so he thanks Clint and finds a way to widen some of the vents like Clint had asked when he’d first shown up at the tower.

He waits a few days, until Harley feels comfortable enough living in what had up until then been a weird superhero frat house to step down from his role of Tony’s permanent shadow, to talk to Steve.

Steve, who’s suddenly stopped being in Tony’s workshop and bed, is eerily distant, to the point that Tony has to catch him in the gym, disrupting his workout and stopping him from destroying another punchbag by destroying it himself with a repulsor blast. “Talk to me, Rogers. C’mon Steve, don’t leave me hanging here.”

It’s looking like Tony might just be the emotionally available and functional one in their relationship now, and, wow, that’s fucked up. Steve only proves him right about that when he shrugs, taking his gloves off and turning to the water bottle he’d left with his shirt by the wall.

Tony then really has no choice but to take Clint’s advice, and Christ, this is hard. “Okay, is this because I flew to Tennessee in the middle of the night, didn’t tell you I was flying to Tennessee, didn’t tell you why I was flying to Tennessee, never mentioned the fact that I sort of saved and was saved by a mouthy ten-year-old when I first went to Tennessee, I didn’t tell you about any of that, I sort of just showed up with the kid, or is there another reason you’re avoiding me?”

It’s the kind of upfront acknowledgement and honesty he’s never managed before, and it surprises him that he’s capable of that, and it seems to surprise Steve too, because he actually looks Tony in the eye and blurts out, “I’m not avoiding you. Just...giving you space.”

“That’s the definition of avoiding someone, Cap.” Tony tries for a smile, trying a little too hard, and any fight or resistance or whatever Steve had been running on to keep his shoulders back and chin up fades and he slumps into Tony’s side, letting him steer them both so they’re sat, backs against the wall, shoulder to shoulder. Steve is still shirtless and sweaty, and if anyone ever asks, that is the reason why Tony’s voice trembles, not anything else, when he asks, “Steve, are you still with me? Still-“

‘Mine’, he wants to say, ‘still a team’, because Tony doesn’t think he can do any of this without Steve at his back, but he will, of course, he probably can, he’s just not sure if he wants to.

Steve’s hand covers his, and he says, “Always,” looking and sounding entirely serious, and Tony relaxes ever so slightly. He tenses again when Steve says, “So. Harley.”

And Tony sort of instantly begins wondering where they need to start with this conversation because he thinks he might have half explained things over the phone from the hospital or when he brought Harley up to the residential floors for the first time, but he’s honestly not sure what he’s said, and that’s not unusual because he hardly ever pays attention to what actually comes out if his mouth, but he maybe should have this time. Whatever he’s said before is apparently enough, enough to have conveyed how important Harley is, how desperate everything seems, because Steve squeezes his hand tentatively and asks, “You’re doing this? Properly?”

The question is more rhetorical than anything else, but Tony answers anyway. “How can I not?”

His thoughts are taken over by memories of Tennessee, of the panic and horror Tony had been consumed by and the kindness and bitchiness this kid showed him, and Tony just shrugs, not knowing how to say it, or even if he needs to.

“What did social services say?” Steve asks the questions none of the other Avengers have yet dared to, and Tony leans into his side, grateful in a way he can’t explain. “He’s mine, if I want him.”

It’s not worth Tony pointing out how much he does, even if this is the result of an unthinkable scenario. And that’s a surprise too, wanting Harley here, wanting this strange, foreign not-quite-a-person-thing that snarks at him, guilts him and hugs him without a second thought around all the time. Maybe it’s not so strange, really.

“He’s my responsibility. I’m his temporary guardian, eventually permanent. His social worker actually said ‘there’s no one else so well equipped’; she’s apparently never read a news article about me in her life, but hey. Unless they change their minds at the three-month assessment, he’s here to stay.“

Steve nods, his mouth drawn into a line, thinking. The look on his face is the one usually seen right before he decides that they should try a full frontal assault on whichever giant bug is invading Manhattan this week. “You don’t have to do this alone, you know.”

Tony nods automatically, out of habit, and Steve repeats himself. “You know, right? You don’t have to do this alone.”

“I know, the Avengers, we’re all one team, family, I know, Steve.” Nodding his head dismissively, Tony leans his head back against Steve’s shoulder only to be jolted uncomfortably upright when Steve turns to look at him, red-faced and determined. “I meant...you didn’t have to be there for Harley on your own because- I could be there too. More than as just an Avenger.”

Tony is sort of stunned by that, and he shouldn’t be, but he is. It’s typical of him, to underestimate and assume he knows things, because he never does. He’s surprised because this thing between them is still so new, new in the way everything is when you’re a perennial fuck up dating a super soldier from the forties, yet Steve is offering the sort of commitment Tony couldn’t even dream about let alone make work with Pepper, who’s known him forever. It makes something in Tony’s chest flutter and Clint had been right, dammit, because here Steve was, surprising him again.

It’s kind of funny that, and Tony would possibly give life a grudging nod for it, except it’s life’s fault in the worst possible way that things change again. But at least this time, Tony knows why the world seems to tilt on its axis.

They go from lazy mornings, if Tony isn’t in the middle of a workshop binge and Steve hasn’t spent all night breaking things in the gym and there isn’t a crazed grad-student intent on destroying/enslaving/terrorising New York, with coffee and breakfast and grossing Clint out to Steve making Harley (and therefore everyone else by extension) breakfast in the mornings before Tony gets him to school, a routine run with military precision, bad nights and urgent Stark Industries projects be damned.

Harley becomes priority one in Jarvis’ programming, a whole floor of the tower slowly becomes his, and there’s space cleared for him in both Tony’s workshop and Steve’s art room. One of Tony’s favourite pastimes becomes watching him ask Natasha for anything and see her cave easily, whether it’s the last blueberry muffin, learning Russian swear words or asking for advice on the best way to track Clint through the vents.

Steve moves permanently into Tony’s rooms, slowly, one pair of awful khaki trousers at a time, and they’re bad at that at first, Tony’s always kept his rooms bare and impersonal, whilst Steve has photos and souvenirs and, God knows why, he lets Dummy up from the workshop sometimes, but they make it work. Harley doesn’t even bat an eyelid when Tony kisses Steve goodbye before the school run or a board meeting or he goes to face Pepper and whatever horrendous thing he’s done to her company this time.

Life can be really funny at times, because it’s Harley who finally loses patience with them — not Clint, who Tony’s been betting on for years, or Thor, who’s been unsuccessfully throwing hints at them pretty much ever since their first date that had ended with an unintended visit to Namor’s palace, mentioning warriors from Asgard with similar but formalised ‘bonds’, Asgardian matrimonial traditions, how much his dearest Jane loves weddings — and tells them plainly that they should ‘just fucking get married, it’s about time, don’t you think, really, oh and please, just once, don’t ground me for swearing’.

They’re not a tentative thing anymore, not new, they know each other inside and out and they grudgingly can admit that they know when they’re beaten and when Harley just happens to be right about something.

It’s not the blink of an eye, but it feels like it, and Tony’s gone from being a mess to ~~still being that mess but with a cooler fashion sense~~ having his shit together, more or less, and having people, a family. It’s fucking weird and it’s possibly the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

Life can be funny sometimes. That’s something Tony Stark is mostly okay with. 

**Author's Note:**

> thoughts?


End file.
